Alright Ladies & Gentlemen, Part 1 is here as promised, and this first article will speak of a few absolutely crucial steps an advertiser needs to implement before investing in PPC Advertising at all.
The Internet advertising arena is massive. Millions of Ads are up on Millions of websites, search engines, content networks, blogs, you name it. Each of these ads is linked to a set of keywords that the concerned advertiser is bidding on to display it online and get traffic to the associated website(s).
As a result, there is very high advertiser competition in nearly every popular or contemporary trending niche online, and bidding on keywords that are not refined and specifically targeted towards a particular audience relevant to your products or services can prove both very expensive as well as ineffective for generating quality traffic to your website(s).
So what can you do to enter the market in the face of fierce competition?
Is it still possible to use Pay Per Click Advertising as a cost-effective means of generating traffic to your website despite there being so many advertisers already active and outbidding your maximum keyword bids?
Is it worth the time and resources to invest in PPC when the cost per click (CPC) on almost every notable keyword combination out there has near-staggering bids already in place?
Can you still invest in popular niches online and get targeted, high quality traffic for cheap?
The answer is: Yes.
But there is some homework to be done before that goal can be achieved. And here’s how.
As a PPC Advertiser you need to first refine what your target audience is on three levels:
Principal Niche:
- This is your target industry as a whole, the category of people on the Internet who you would ideally want to display your ads to. Before embarking on any advertising campaign you must first develop a fair idea of what target industry suits the product(s) you are looking to sell.
New Advertisers make the financially fatal mistake of simply selecting a wide assortment of keywords, placing them in their PPC campaigns, creating weakly structured Text, Image and Banner Ad Units for these keywords and starting the campaign off to run 24 hours a day without any level of optimization of neither Target Audience nor Campaign internals whatsoever.
This very attitude to PPC Advertising, being “in a hurry to sell online once a product has been developed” is what causes new advertisers to exit the market as quickly as they entered it, because the results of such quick and non-calibrated PPC Campaigns are simply put, Very Very Expensive. Cost-per-Click on wide audiences can go up to as much as $2-4 a click with the Advertiser Competition constantly raising their bids on the same keywords to acquire your share of the market exposure.. a phenomenal amount of money to pay for only a single visitor to your website(s).
Secondary Level Audience:
- This is a more specific subset of your Principal Niche, a particular crowd in your target industry who you want to display your ads to. For example, if your Principal Niche is “SEO Optimization”, then your Secondary Level Audience could be “SEO Optimization Experts”, the addition of one extra keyword there manages to refine your target market immensely by narrowing your ad exposure to experts in the field of SEO Optimization and not just everyone in the SEO market.
CORE Audience:
- This is the most refined subset of your Secondary Audience, the crowd who you definitely want for to see your ads on Search Engines and Content Networks based on your selection of contextually relevant keywords, Ad Copy and individual keyword bids.
Your Core Audience is that group of people or consumers who you want to turn into Prospects and eventually Customers who will buy your products and/or services. This is the most important step in refining your final target audience and there are a number of proven strategies that allow you to do this efficiently and cost-effectively.
Having a Core Audience to market your products to allows you to narrow down the scope of your PPC Advertising Campaigns substantially. It changes everything in a campaign, from your choice of keywords, choice of Ad Copy, choice of content on the URLs your ads link to, as well as the choice of products to put up for sale on the target websites, all of the afore-mentioned being purely dependent on the nature and supposed “willingness to purchase” of your target Core Audience.
But how does one determine the “willingness to purchase” of a Prospect or Website Visitor?
There is no one secret formula to successfully turning a visitor into a customer.
The most important step to achieving this is to first make sure that the visitors you are driving to your website through PPC Advertising would be interested (if at all) in the products or services you have on offer.
If a visitor arrives at your website after clicking a PPC Text or Banner Ad you’ve placed on a Search Engine, and your products are not what he or she was looking for, then not only have you wasted a “click”s worth of Advertising Spend, you have also managed to create a campaign that is driving more visitors of the likes of this last not-so-interested one to your website, and it is quite likely that your Profit per Sale will go down, if anyone buys your products at all that is.
To prevent your campaign from reaching out to people who are most likely to NOT buy your products, you need to tailor your choice of keywords to fantastically specific levels.
Keyword Suggestion Tools on the Internet today are very good in that they give you relevant synonyms to your input keywords, but what they can’t do is tailor them to suit your target audience.
These tools provide you with keyword suggestions, along with very useful statistics such as the Average Cost-per-Click associated, Estimated Positions your Ad would be displayed in based on your budget, Estimated Number of Clicks you’re most likely to get based on your Budget, Geo-Targeting and Maximum Bids, etc.
They are extremely useful in analysing your “possible” target industry in the form of keywords, but they are by no means there to do all the work for you.
Keyword Tools do not identify your CORE Audience. They identify your Principal Niche, i.e. the target industry you’d like to deploy your PPC Campaign in.
You as an advertiser need to narrow down the resulting keywords from your own research as well as from freely accessible Keyword Tools, into a CORE Set of Keywords. These keywords will typically include variations of your Principal Niche, as well as very specifically targeted keywords that include Prefix and Suffix inclusions of every day words used by people to narrow down their search for products online. For example, people looking for a popular SEO Solution might search for “best SEO optimization tool”, “best SEO optimization software”, “best free SEO software”, etc.
A quality Prospect (someone who may end up buying your products) will always know what he or she wants to buy. They will always have a “willingness” to buy something.
If you can identify all the CORE benefits of your products to people out there, you will always be able to create a CORE Audience for yourself. Once you’ve identified your CORE Audience, you can then embark on creating a list of PPC keywords most likely to draw in members of your hypothesised CORE Audience.
Remember, you must always opt for a QUALITY VISITOR over ANY Visitor. As an advertiser you must always be out to ensure that your PPC Campaign is drawing only a QUALITY SET of Prospects, who will almost always have a “willingness” to buy what you have on offer.
The more you narrow your prospective audience, the more CORE it gets. A CORE Audience is always more likely to buy than a Principal or Secondary Audience.
Remember to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer before designing a PPC Campaign. If you don’t know what your potential customer wants from you, you will not be successful in converting any potential customer into a Buying customer.
Ali S. Khan
Chief Technology Officer
TheInternetTimeMachine.com
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